Surgeon-writer, Dr. Cornelia Griggs joins me this week. Check out her article with Dr. Andrea Merrill, The Hidden Reason Women are Leaving Surgery: They're Being Pushed Out here. Check out her book, The Sky Was Falling here. The first physician in a family of writers, artists, and communicators, she grew up surrounded by people willing to speak openly about medicine’s vulnerabilities. A former theater kid, she found early inspiration in Atul Gawande’s Complications and the patient safety movement—so much so that she wrote her senior honors thesis on its history. After college at Harvard and medical school at Columbia, she developed a deep interest in health policy and the cultural forces shaping modern medicine. She reflects on how differently she writes when her “research hat” is on—passive voice, sterile, stripped of self—compared to the personal writing she uses to metabolize the hardest moments of her career. We talk about what it was like to be a young surgeon in New York City when COVID hit—what was meant to be the crown jewel of her training. Following intensivists on early medical Twitter, she became convinced by February that disaster was coming. What frightened her most wasn’t ventilator shortages but the prediction that hospitals would run out of staff as clinicians fell ill. She felt dismissed, even gaslit, when others minimized the threat. Yet she knew—capital B Bad was coming. When the surge hit, it felt dystopian: inadequate PPE, mounting loss, the emotional toll of watching a system strain and fracture. That experience deepened her commitment to nurturing the softer, intuitive, vulnerable parts of herself—and to helping others do the same. Cornelia also speaks candidly about women’s attrition from medicine, including her co-authored work with Dr. Andrea Merrill examining why so many are leaving. From differential treatment in the OR to referral streams quietly diverted to younger male partners, from pay disparities to the subtle “thousand paper cuts” of heightened expectations, she describes the cumulative mental load women surgeons carry. She has a unique vantage point watching how OR staff treat her husband compared to how they treat her and her female colleagues. Meanwhile, medicine offers few of the perks seen in tech and other industries—despite the time, sacrifice, and invisible labor the profession demands. We explore the erosion of public trust, the ways academic medicine has ceded ground to the wellness industry, and how rebuilding credibility will require more than data—it will require humanity. For Cornelia, the path forward means reinjecting compassion into the profession, setting boundaries, and redefining what it means to be a powerful physician in today’s world. Follow Dr. Griggs on TikTok here. Check out Dr. Frances Mei Hardin's book, Surgeon on the Edge here. Sign up for "When you Can Cut the Tension with a #10 Blade: Anxiety, Performance, and the Surgical Nervous System" here. Join us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.
